Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a San Francisco-based AI company building the voice interface for the AI era. A four-time founder who taught himself to code at age nine in New Delhi, Kothari holds BS and MS degrees from Stanford in Computer Science and AI, taught Deep Learning alongside Andrew Ng, and published medical AI research. After selling his first startup FeatherX to Cerebra Technologies straight out of college, he co-founded Wispr in 2021 with Stanford batchmate Sahaj Garg. The company's flagship product, Wispr Flow, transforms spoken ramblings into polished writing across 100+ languages with sub-second latency, achieving 50% month-over-month growth and a 20% paid conversion rate - five times the industry standard. Wispr has raised $81 million total, including a $30 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures and a $25 million extension led by Notable Capital, at a $700 million valuation. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023, Kothari is betting that keyboards will be vintage store items within five years.
Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.